Amal Augustine, a final year engineering student from Kochi, sold the registration rights ofmaxchanzuckerberg.org to the Facebook founder.
Due to this facebook approached Amal for the domain name which is short for Maxime Chan Zuckerberg, the name of Mark Zuckerberg’s daughter.
“I have registered quite a few domain names and I have been doing it for some time. I registered this domain name when their baby was born last December”, Augustine, a student of KMEA engineering college, told TOI.
Amal was contacted by GoDaddy on whether he would be willing to sell the domain name.
His reply was a “yes” and in return he asked for a decent sum of $700 which made Rs. 47000
But, to his surprise, the deal closing email came from Facebook itself!
“When the letter came officially mentioning the change of registration, I noticed the FB letterhead: But since it’s not legal to negotiate, I just went ahead and closed the deal in seven days,” he said. The mail was from none other than the firm which handles Mark Zuckerberg’s financial deals. Sara Chapel, the manager of Iconic Capital wrote directly to Amal, acknowledging the deal.
Cybersquatting is the process of registering an Internet domain of a trademark, which belongs to someone else or an organisation/brand. The cyber squatter then offers to sell it to the company or person who owns a trademark contained within the domain name.
Cybersquatting isn’t illegal. Even in the past, domains such as salmankhan.com have been ‘squatted’ by techies in the past. Though it is not considered as a violation as per the Indian cyber law, it is a civil rights violation.